Princess Auto’s Flowcasting journey featured in Canadian Retailer magazine

CR_SC2017

Our client Princess Auto Ltd. is the subject of a feature article in the inaugural Supply Chain issue of Canadian Retailer magazine (published by the Retail Council of Canada). Click here to learn about how they are using the Flowcasting planning process to significantly improve in-stocks and profits while unleashing a new omnichannel fulfilment model. You can also download a PDF copy here.

 

The E-Commerce Secret Weapon

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. – Robin Sloan

TopSecret

The end is nigh! If you still have physical stores with inventory, staff and cash registers, you’re a dinosaur and Amazon is coming to kill you! The future is online!

Okay, the rhetoric hasn’t been quite that sensational, but it wasn’t so long ago that ‘experts’ were on the verge of predicting the demise of retail as we know it.

As people (eventually) came to their senses on this, a new reality began to emerge, hidden in plain sight. It turns out that the decades of investments retailers made in their physical store footprint may not have been a complete waste of money after all. In fact, it’s actually a key competitive advantage that may result in Amazon playing some ‘catch up’ of their own in the not too distant future.

To be sure, the ‘buy online, delivery to home’ channel pioneered by Amazon represented a significant shift in how people buy goods. If you didn’t mind a bit of a wait and some extra delivery costs, you could shop without ever having to leave the house.

Over time, new products and services were added to build density, reduce shipping costs to customers and decrease delivery times for many in stock items. This could only happen cost effectively by positioning inventory closer to customers… kinda like what ‘NARs’ (‘non Amazon retailers’ – trademark pending) have been doing for decades.

For customers, that means brick and mortar retailers with an online presence can offer far more shopping and delivery options than Amazon (at least for now).

Click and Collect (or Buy Online, Pick Up in Store)

One way to look at click and collect is that it’s ‘not quite as convenient as home delivery’. In reality, click and collect isn’t necessarily a ‘convenience compromise’ in the mind of every customer – many (including yours truly) consider it to be a different (and more cost effective) kind of convenience.

This option allows customers to reserve their stock in advance and have store staff traverse the aisles on their behalf. And when customers get to the store to pick up their online order, they have the additional option to grab a few last minute or forgotten items. Or maybe they just want curbside pickup so they can get the items loaded directly into their trunk without even having to park.

And for customers who truly view click and collect as a convenience compromise vis-a-vis home delivery, Walmart now allows them to trade in some of their convenience for savings by giving them a discount for choosing click and collect over home delivery.

Third Party Personal Shoppers

This is a relatively new phenomenon, but companies like Instacart have been partnering with retailers to take orders online, shop local stores and home deliver to customers, offering cool features like chatting so that the personal shoppers can make real time decisions with the customers for substitutions or to take advantage of in store promotions.

Home Delivery from Stores

Because retailers already have inventory geographically close to customers, they have the ability to take advantage of cheaper modes of transit (i.e. ground vs air) to deliver in a 2 day time window.

But they also have the opportunity to make delivery promises in hours rather than days in their more densely populated markets, through the use of local couriers or even their own store employees.

Will all of these delivery options (plus a few others that haven’t been dreamed up yet) be popular and/or profitable? Click and collect seems like a done deal – time will tell for the others.

The point here is that these options are only available to retailers who have a retail store network in place. Far from being outmoded or passe, the ‘brick and mortar’ store network is becoming a critical linchpin in meeting customers’ online shopping expectations.

You never would have imagined it a few years ago, but the popularity of online retailing has actually served to enhance the importance of the old fashioned brick and mortar retail store rather than to diminish it. And as such, planning the supply chain from the store level back using Flowcasting becomes even more critical to a retailer’s success than ever.